iPad users are forking over plenty of money to read their favorite digital publications on Apple’s iPad. In the U.S., the top 100 grossing publications in Apple’s Newsstand in February made more than $70,000 per day, according to Distimo. Pretty good for a five-month old product.

This week Inkling debuted the 2.0 version of its software, which makes interactive and digital versions of college textbooks for the iPad. So GigaOM headed over to Inkling’s San Francisco headquarters to get an in-person demo from founder and CEO Matt MacInnis.

Last week, Harry Potter author JK Rowling announced Poettermore, an ambitious new online property that will be the exclusive retailer for Potter e-books, Pottermore will no doubt do a mean business as an e-book storefront — and ruffle the feathers of traditional publishers in the process.

Amazon’s success with its Kindle business is hitting an inflection point as it nears 10 percent of the company’s revenues, according to an analyst report. The success of the Kindle business is at a point where it can affect the overall growth the company.

Magazine apps appear to be enjoying quite the bump thanks to the introduction of in-app subscriptions to select titles. Wired, for example, is the fifth top grossing app on the iPad App Store right now. Comic book publishers need to get in on the action.

For all its growth, the e-book market has been stillborn in one major way: methods in which to monetize. But recent news that a Spanish company called 24Symbols went into beta on a an e-book service shows that digital publishing could finally be evolving.

Report

In the span of just six months, e-books have gone from an interesting curiosity to what many think is the future, as well as the eventual cause of death for big publishing. No doubt, Apple’s iPad and a revamped Kindle lineup have accelerated the momentum of this large-scale shift towards digital publishing, as both the technology and publishing worlds watch consumers go from paper to digital at an eye-popping rate.

At GigaOM and GigaOM Pro, we thought it would be interesting to bring these two worlds together to talk about the impact of e-books on the publishing industry. We invited some of the leading voices in e-books and publishing to GigaOM’s offices on Aug. 25 for the GigaOM Pro Bunker Session entitled, “Author to Audience: Disintermediation in Publishing.” Watch archive video and further discussion here.